MANGA AND OTHER EXTREME SPORTS

ZIANA DEEN - Writer, 3rd Year, Architecture

"Currently recovering from boba addiction"

Originally published on Sept. 13, 2018

I’d always been an energetic kid. Anyone who knows me can attest to that: I have enough energy to fuel a country. To give you an idea of how energetic I was, as a third grader, I went to a friend’s house and ended up jumping off the couches into walls. Five years later, my friend’s mom was still hesitant about letting me over. Some of my energy was the energy all kids have, and some of it came from the sugar I inhaled. And some of it, I owe to sports manga.

Just imagine it: it’s 2008, I’m 10, and if I wasn’t running around like a crazy spitfire, I was in the local library, sitting my ass down besides a stack of dozens of sport manga books. Because you can’t read only one sports manga — no, you have to read it all in one go. Because if there’s one thing that sports manga do, it’s make you anticipate the next volume.

Fellow fans of sports manga will understand the rush of excitement you feel from reading it. It is not unlike the excitement you feel at an actual sports game. As Sena rushes towards the opponent’s end zone, you’re cheering – not aloud, but inside, where real anticipation awaits. And sometimes it’s actually aloud – I legitimately screamed in horror everytime Yuri fumbled a quadruple jump (and I let out an ear-splitting shriek when Victor kissed Yuri). Even board game sports manga, like Hikaru no Go and Chihayafuru, could have me on the edge of my seat, turning pages as fast as I could to find out what happened next.

And I don’t know what it is about sports manga that had my energy shoot through the roof, but something about Prince of Tennis made sweating over a tennis court, for eight weeks one summer, seem like a good idea. After reading over 300 chapters of Air Gear, I put on the roller skates we’d kept hidden in the garage since before I was born, and the next day was the proud bearer of new scabs and blisters on my legs. Whistle encouraged me to infiltrate the boy’s soccer games during recess for two years; eventually, I became the only girl allowed to play with them (a trophy I bear proudly, by the way).

Sports manga has encouraged me not only to stay in shape, but become a better person. From animated depictions of the world’s greatest sports, I learned camaraderie, hard work, and perseverance. I learned that growth occurs over time, and that losing, while difficult, is not always a bad thing. It’s no wonder sports manga are so popular. There’s just something, as you’re traveling through sports in manga, that makes you feel like a spectator on bleachers of the game. No other genre of manga has you more involved, invested, and consumed, than sports manga.

And that’s pretty damn great.